David Stern left a great, but complicated, legacy that is part of the fabric of the NBA

An owner goes rogue

Just a few months into David Stern’s tenure as NBA commissioner in 1984, he faced a crisis when one of the association’s owners defied a decision by the league’s Board of Governors and moved his franchise after the request had been denied.

Donald Sterling had bought the San Diego Clippers in May 1981 and quickly established a reputation for odd decisions, unpaid bills and a mountain of losses. While the streaks did not start on Sterling’s watch, it was under his curious tutelage that the Clippers set NBA records for the longest gap between postseason appearances and playoff series victories.

Originally known as the Buffalo Braves, the club missed the playoffs after the 1976-77 and would remain playoff-free throughout the entire decade of the 1980s before finally breaking a 15-year exile in 1992. But it would be another 14 years — 2006 — before the Clippers would win a playoff series, a 29-year hiatus.

Sterling had been fined a then-record $10,000 for boldly guaranteeing publicly his team would pile up enough losses in the 1982-83 season to have the worst record in the Western Conference and be in the coin flip for the right to select three-time Naismith Award winner Ralph Sampson with the first pick in the 1983 draft.

The Sterling era included the owner’s wife arriving at the team offices to count how much paper was being used in a mimeograph machine, a bus company stranding the team at an airport over non-payment of bills and multiple hotels refusing to house the team on the road because bills were so often left unpaid. The coup de grace was asking the team trainer to re-use athletic tape.

Bryce Miller recounted those stories and more this week in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

But where Stern and Sterling first crossed swords was when Sterling moved his franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles in May 1984 … after the Board of Governors had denied Sterling’s petition to move his franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles. Sterling eventually paid a $3.2 million fine, per Armen Keteyian’s book “Money Players: Inside the New NBA”

But the Clippers owner remained a stain on the NBA for another 30 years before he was banned for life and forced to sell the franchise by then-new NBA commissioner Adam Silver just three months after Stern left office.

Stern allowing the Sterling era to last through three decades of almost non-stop incompetence and pettiness was not one of his finer moments.